Blockbuster: Anthony Watts skewers Muller, BEST, and the surface record all in one paper

This new pre-print paper by Anthony Watts accomplishes so much. Assuming that no major problems are found, the pieces of the jigsaw fit and pass the common sense test. Yes, hot air rises off concrete.

There goes half the warming trend. The most accurate thermometers in the right places are not recording high trends. High estimates come from combining good records with poor ones then adjusting that up.

They show Muller and BEST’s latest exaggerated claims of 1.5C are meaningless.

They show that only class 1 and 2 stations (which are placed well, not next to concrete, car-parks, or air-conditioners) give reliable data and the warming trend from these stations is much lower than the warming trend from Class 3, 4 or 5 stations. It’s what we always knew — thermometers near artificial heat sources are measuring artificial warming, but it’s not the global kind.

Mueller, BEST, GISS, Hadley and all the others should have removed the data from poor stations entirely. No amount of statistical chicanery can correct the artificial warming effect no matter how you adjust, blend, or homogenize the data.

Worse, the adjusted data shows an even warmer trend than the warmest and worst stations. That casts a very dark shadow indeed. How honest or impartial are the scientists who adjust data from stations with thermometers near air-conditioners and create more warming? Bad stations have been adjusted up, instead of down, and then the good stations were adjusted up to match the now-really-awful-bad ones. The stench of failure and a lack of dedication to the truth in on show…

You don’t need a PhD to know that thermometers placed in car parks are not measuring global warming.

Only gullible fans of authority would believe the incredulous claim that statistics can correct for gross mismeasurements. Unless those researchers had details about when air-conditioners went on and off, when concrete was laid, relaid, changed to asphalt, when cars parked nearby, and how windspeed affected that warming on an hourly basis — they can’t correct for the errors introduced by those things. They don’t have that data, and even if they did it would be exceedingly unlikely it would be sufficient to extract the signal of regional warming from the noise of the artificial heat sources around the thermometer. It would be a whole PhD thesis just to accurately account for a single surface station, and that’s if they had the data on that minutae, and we know they don’t.

This is a paper that will be quoted and requoted. It’s five years worth of work, unpaid, done late at night, entirely redone in the last year. We all owe Anthony Watts and Evan Jones, plus Steve McIntyre and John Christie, plus many others (like all the volunteers who did site-surveys) more than a huge thank you. Watts has taken on giant institutes like NOAA, GISS, Hadley, East Anglia, they with billions at their disposal – and he’s won. Sure, this won’t be the last word on it, but where are the real climate scientists who say enough is enough and they want junk thermometer records deleted from “high quality” compilations and they want adjustments for artificial warming to cool the result, not exacerbate the error?

There’s a newer method to categorize stations into five classes and this makes all the difference.

Leroy’s 1999 classification system is out and Leroy 2010 is in. Menne 2010 and Muller et al 2012 both used the old system. Anthony Watts uses the new system and says it makes all the difference:

The new Leroy 2010 classification system of surface weather stations shows that only 20% of stations are adequate (Class 1 plus Class 2).

The trends as recorded by good thermometers are very different to the trends recorded by the bad ones. Class 1 & 2 show only 0.15C warming per decade (which is slightly less than what happened in the 1870′s). Class 3 – 5 (the badly sited thermometers) recorded 0.25C per decade. There goes nearly half of all the catastrophic warming. Worse though, is the miracle of modern adjistering – where two lower numbers are “averaged” up to an even higher one. Post-normal maths?

The new official adjusted result bears no resemblance to the observations. Why bother having thermometers?..

Airports can make even a good thermometer useless

On a micrositing level some airport stations may appear to be ok. But on a mesositing level they affect the results, rather a lot and since about half of global stations are based at airports this is rather a killer point. Airports are excluded from this graph below. Compare it to the graph below that. The blue bars are the trends in the mean temperature for the best thermometers (class 1 & 2) in different US regions. The yellow bars are the class 3 – 5 stations — the badly sited ones — and obviously they are higher.

Ominously, the red bars are the adjusted combination of the two lower bars. Its what happens when you mix good data with bad data and then multiply the errors with statistics. It’s possible to turn out truly awful “results”.

When airports are included the raw readings in the well sited thermometers are much higher (below). The pilots all need to know the temperature of the airport, but as far as taxpayers are concerned, the airport does not represent the environment of the surrounding 100km (or 1200km give or take the smoothing techniques you care to use).

Figure 6 – Station Class comparisons of decadal trends by region, airports only

Below the different types of sensors are compared. MMTS are the electronic modern thermometers, and they generally record lower trends, especially for mean and max trends. But like any good piece of equipment, they too can be adjusted to mimic older less reliable tools, and show higher temperature trends than were actually recorded.

Notice how in every second column the blue diamond (MMTS) is adjusted up to match the other older or less accurate equipment.

Below, the rural MMTS stations, (without the small rural airports that are sometimes equipped with MMTS equipment) have the lowest decadal trends of all classes and subsets of stations. (Blue bars)

The new MMTS electronic sensors were found to be much lower than the others. Some of these regions recorded a cooling trend when only rural stations with an MMTS thermometer were used. As usual, the red flag “adjusted” trends are the result of statistical dynamite.

Do visit Watts Up to read the whole paper and watch the fallout unfold. Donate to help him continue this essential and excellent work. What is posted here is just a part of the picture, there are 21 figures at least: see it all on Watts Up now.

Watts up also has the powerpoint files. The full PDF original and hundreds of comments.

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Thanks to Josh for the cartoon. Thanks to Anthony for so much, including the advance notice.

Readjusting? The positive feedback is an artifact of the increase in IR absorbed by the lower atmosphere by a factor of 5, offset by exaggerated cloud albedo. So, sunlit oceans evaporate like mad whilst the cloudy areas give correct average temperature.

The good news in all of this is that the warmbotrolls will be quiet until GISS and the machine produce a dodgy reply. That may take….oh about another 3 hours so enjoy the peace and quiet while you can.

Of course the the warmbotrolls are quiet. They have to receive their marching orders from the hired mercenaries like US PIRG.

It is no surprise that US PIRG (U.S. Public Interest Research Group) is funded by George Soros & company link Activistcash shows US PIRG is also funded by the Rockefellers you can fish through the other foundations to see who funds (and therefore controls) WWF, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the rest of the Astroturf organizations.

It amazes me that people follow these Astroturf organizations like sheep based on their feel good propaganda without ever checking who is really pulling the funding/control strings. It is not like you have to hunt through a library or send letters demanding information. It is all there readily accessable on the internet. For example here is Greenpeace and Sierra Club and the money laundering “Charity” The Tides Foundation.

I mention this because the naive young political activists will ignore you and follow these Judas goats until you SHOW they are Judias goats. Everyone hates being a conman’s mark and this is the fastest way to show activists are marks.

After that they might just listen to something like Anthony’s paper.

To change the mind of a mule, the farmer answered, “you’ve got to get its attention first. The two-by -four gets the mule’s attention” Pointing out the con is the two by four.

While I like what you’ve done in your numbered 5 points, especially point 5 (I’ve been making most of these same points all day to anyone who would listen), where you’ve altered Watts’ pie chart you’ve made an error: good is only 6%; (half of the worst!), not 12%.Fixed as fast as I could! -Thanks – Jo

And congrats to Anthony Watts for all his long and hard work on this vital aspect of AGW.

For years we sceptics have been watching our car thermometers and noticing the change when driving from under-developed areas to the city. It takes a while for the bleedin’ obvious [particularly when it's contrary to ideology] to hit home.

Thanks Jo for a good summary and congratulations to Anthony in putting the US temperature record straight. A model to apply to our Australasian temperature records. But the conclusions will be totally ignored by the MSM and attacked by the gravy train/vested interest “scientists”.

Some time ago Ed Caryl explained to me that the GHCN station coordinates are that rude that you cannot trace them with google maps. You have to look for meta-data and a lot of help (by volunteers?) Perhaps the other way around may be useful. Try to obtain a list of all airports on the world. Pilots must have something of that kind. Or am I naive? Then you may find how many stations are certainly not on airports.

Jo. I suggest you try E.M Smith (chiefio) who researched this quite extensively some time ago. If he doesn’t have up-to-date figures, he would be the best one I know to rapidly get them for you, as I think he has all the relevant database info already downloaded!

Those who have been duped by the whole CAGW scam now have REAL evidence and REAL science to look at. Those who knowingly lied and warped the evidence, well, they’re between a rock and a hard place. They have to accept this paper (which is very thorough and very sound), or they blow their cover. Any “scientist” or “scientific body” yelling too loudly or objecting too strongly will be showing their true face. REAL scientists will take it aboard and be grateful to it.

This is delicious. Watching the dastards squirm will be icing on the cake.

Splice and dice [GCHN] and fixing Mike’s nature trick wot done it – kinda like Banks fixing the LIBOR rate – you suspect it was/has been going on, when you find out it was really going on…….you ain’t that surprised.

Global warming, from mankind’s puny CO2 input, was always a stretch of the imagination to far.
The conclusion to the postulation came before the empirical evidence – what else did they have apart from IPCC models and GISS, HadCRU temps – pathetic really. But! boy oh boy when those investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank et al [saw the potential margins, eyes glazed over and taxpayer backing - orgasmo-wow!]. Immediately the shout went up;
“get the spin meisters on the case!” – well the masters of the universe can do magic – can’t they?

And the politicians? and the MSM [ABC/BBC]……….. huh, they still think Al Gore is the daddy!

Actually the Daddy was Maurice Strong, a good buddy of Al Gore. He was chair of the First Earth summit in 1972 and Kyoto’s architect. Funny how he now has to hideout in China or face criminal charges in Canada over the Food for Oil Scam. Funny how he has been involved in the oil and banking business from the get go.

In brief, Maurice Strong worked in Saudi Arabia for a Rockefeller company, Caltex, in 1953. He left Caltex in 1954 to worked at high levels in banking and oil. By 1971, he served as a trustee for the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1972 was Secretary-General of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment known as the First Earth Summit. He was Co-founder of the WWF and Senior Advisor to the World Bank and the UN.

Strong is the brains behind much of this. He is credited with coming up with the idea of NGOs after working for YMCA international early in his carreer.

I do tend forget that old Mau’[Mao?] has been the ‘daddy’ of lots of this type of nonsense – perhaps ‘nonsense’ is not quite strong enough – anyway the scam eviro’ advocate industry. Maurice Strong, almost single handedly kicked it all off, green activist and zealot, maker and formulator of immense mischief.

I have followed Strong for some time, but didn’t know about his connection with Caltex. That explains how he “suddenly appeared” at the Rockefeller Foundation. He would have kept up with all of his oil buddies while he was playing at being a banker and trader.

The problem is of course that such a small fraction of the excess energy being retained in Earth’s energy system is going into the troposphere that even if the surface temps were overstated by a factor of 2, the energy represented is so tiny compared to the energy being retained by the oceans, that the whole issue is rather academic at best. But in the end, I suspect Muller et. al., will prevail over Watts et. al., and in rather short order the amount of bias in surface station data will prove to be no where close to a factor of 2, and will be more on the order of 10 to 15% at most. Whether reduced by a factor of 2 or only 15%, the amount of energy change in the troposphere is dwarfed by the massive energy being retained by Earth’s oceans.

So where is it, then? The heat retained in the oceans appears to be “missing in action”. Maybe you idiot warmists will postulate “dark heat”. “We know it is there from our models but it can’t be seen or measured”.

As we head to an ice-free summer Arctic, keep telling yourself that we can’t find any of the energy being retained by the oceans. A great deal of that ice is melting from the bottom ad most of the mass is in the water. The temperature of the water entering the Arctic is the warmest in approximately 2000 years- and yes, this means it is warmer than it was during the MWP.

Why, the Northwest Passage might even open up in the near future — just like it did in 1853, right after the Little Ice Age ended.

The temperature of the water entering the Arctic is the warmest in approximately 2000 years- and yes, this means it is warmer than it was during the MWP.

One wonders how this is measured? Perhaps you can enlighten us (or at least include a link — just making un-sourced claims isn’t very convincing).
Proxies for air temperature in the region (like this GISP3 Greenland ice core from NOAA) clearly show that not only was it warmer curing the Medieval Warm Period, but was warmer for most of the Holocene over the last 11,000 years.

You obviously have not heard, or been told about, the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, and its natural cyclic variations, that have been known to mariners for centuries. A little reading in that area might help you to better understand some of he factors that may be in play regarding Greenland.

Also, you need to have a look at what happened in the East Siberian Sea last winter. While you were having sleepless nights, worrying about all of the missing heat, that might be in the oceans (on the basis that it must be hiding somewhere, right?) some Russian sailors were worrying about being trapped in pack ice that was several metres thick. But of course, that didn’t happen, did it, because they didn’t have pictures of the ships on television or in the newspapers, and the sailors were not Tweeting about it, or telling their friends about in on Facebook.

Whether reduced by a factor of 2 or only 15%, the amount of energy change in the troposphere is dwarfed by the massive energy being retained by Earth’s oceans.

And I’ll bet London to a brick that you can’t quantify that Gates.

Furthermore, having made the statement that the “massive” energy retained by the oceans “dwarfs” the amount of energy change in the troposhere, how is it then Einstein that you alarmist fraudulent lemming warmists claim the troposphere can warm the oceans?

Further furthermore, (heh heh) you alarmist fraudulent lemming warmists claim that that “massive” retained energy will come back from it’s travesty travels and cook us to death in the future. But you reckon the troposphere warms the oceans. How and when will the oceans then turn this around and warm the troposphere? Is it like tag team wrestling where they take turns punishing us?

Gates, have you ever recorded yourself and listened to yourself?
Try it, you may wake up to yourself one day. Bozo.

Look at the paper directly and you’ll find that Levitus adjusted Argos data. Since the theme of this thread is a blockbuster story about surface temperature adjustment errors, I can’t imaging how they’d do better with an even smaller number of readings and using what appears to be similar “adjustment” procedures.

I do expect that warmists would shift to new “findings” after all the volunteers demonstrate that the previous temperature data is messed up. I also note that they choose to hide this heat where it is even more difficult to prove but yet they boast about how they have done so.

R.Gates
DWLWIR slowing the cooling of the oceans was it? Sorry, I have personally conducted a number of empirical experiments into this and 15 um IR incident on the surface of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool has an negligible effect on its rate of cooling, where as the effects of LWIR on the cooling rate of other materials is measurable. Missing heat hiding below the 700m range of the ARGO buoys is a Trenberthian fantasy.

Just a note – most other warmists have “moved on” from the whole DWLWIR thing due to the impossibility of it having any measurable impact over 71% of the Earth’s surface. The new “higher truth” is that outgoing IR intercepted by CO2 is not immediately re-radiated from the molecule but rather transfers the energy by conduction to the surrounding air. This raises the air temperature, and thereby the altitude at which CO2 can radiate directly to space and due to the light from Venus being reflected from a weather balloon blah, blah blah.

When they work out that CO2 can also radiate energy to space that it has acquired conductively from the surface and the atmosphere and not just energy acquired from outgoing LWIR from the surface, you can be sure there will be yet another “Higher truth”

And just in case you were not aware of how much more energy there is in the shorter wavelengths, visible and ultraviolet, here is a table from from a Wiki on the electromagnetic spectrum It starts at the top with Y=Gamma and goes to ELF= Extremely low freq.

In plain English there ain’t much energy in those infrared wavelengths that CO2 is reflecting back to earth and there is not much of any one wavelength -see this Graph – because a black/gray body like earth radiates over a very broad band compared to the sun. Notice how the scales are changed WITHOUT NOTATION in the classic graph as shown by Wiki to give the appearance that the sun and earth energies are the same. Of course they are equal but not in the same manner as represented in the second graph. If you look at the very bottom or top of the graph you can see the spacing for 0.2 to 1 microns (under the solar spectrum) is the same as the spacing for 10 to 70 microns (under the earth’s spectrum) and there is no legend for the vertical axis.

Anazing how much misdirection there is in this scam.

[post caught as potential spam because of the number of links. Please limit the links in any one post to less than 10]ED

Having said that there is something terribly wrong with heat measurement in the ocean; the surface has been cooling for some time, OHC to 700 meters has been fairly flat since 2003, when the ARGO system was introduced, yet we are expected to believe that the abyss, below 700 meters, is gaining heat at a rapid rate.

How can that be if the mechanism for warming the ocean is backradiation by IR, which cannot penetrate the ocean surface, but apparently is penetrating but not warming the surface or the upper ocean yet is going straight to the ocean depths?

1, CO2 has gone up
2, Temp has gone up
3, how do we correlate the two?
4, Claim nothing on Earth ever changes unless it is forced that way we can blame all change on CO2
4a, All changes in climate are unusual to the extreme
4b, The sun is a static object in the sky so apart from the obvious initial input of energy it has no effect beyond this initial input
4c, I have a unicorn in my back yard as a pet.

Reminds me of that old joke, two cows are in a paddock (field) chatting away about the dangers of mad cow disease, one cow says the other “I am not worried about mad cows disease” the other responds “why not” (thinking his friend knows about a remedy of sorts) the first cow responds “because i am a squirrel”.

Thus the beleivers are not aware that they have already gone mad why else would you think changes in the sun have SFA to do with climate.

R Gates –if Micheal Mann and William Connelly are rubbishing Muller already I cannot see “the Team” working very hard to try to make BEST look better than AW’s effort.
Also is it now all about energy and not temperatures? Is the new term going to be Global Energy Changes and not climate change ??

AGW has always been about altering Earth’s energy balance. Troposheric surface temps are just one metric for measuring a fraction of the imbalance– the easiest one to measure but hardly the largest or most important.

Now you have to take specific gravity into account to determine volumetric specific heat Cv and thus:

Cv (air) = 0.001297 J/cm3.K
Cv (sea water) = 4.035 J/cm3.K

The specific volumetric heat is 3111 times greater for water than that of air despite them both being at equilibrium at room temperature (293 deg K). So far so good.

The definition of a greenhouse gas is that it absorbs and radiates IR energy. Once it absorbs IR, this energy build up will manifest itself as temperature (1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics). If that temperature (energy) of the CO2 exceedes that of its surrounding air, i.e the temperature (energy) differential, it then wants to impart that difference to its surroundings to attain equilibrium (Zeroth, 1st and 2nd laws). It will do so either via radiation, conduction or convection pathways. Of the 3 forms of heat transfer, by far the most efficient for a gas phase is convection, thus the majority of that temperature (energy) differential will be transferred in this manner. Radiant and conductive pathways will amount to relatively small heat (energy) transfer.

As CO2 is about 390ppm of 0.039% of the makeup of the atmosphere, even a doubling of CO2 concentration is going to have very little real impact on climate change. QED.

It’s odd, when people paint such a dire climate picture, that I have never once met, or corresponded with, a single person who cares anything at all about actual CO2 emissions in real time. Complete indifference. The subject is never even raised.

Think about it. Think of all the CO2 emitted in real time, of where and how, and ask if you have ever met one person who cares. Maybe you have, I haven’t.

Repeating: I have never encountered, in the flesh or otherwise, a single person who cares about actual CO2 emissions in real time.

The effect of greenhouse gases is to alter the thermal gradient between the ocean and atmosphere, reducing the heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. The increased DLW only has to warm the very top of the ocean skin layer to alter the thermal gradient, which is exactly what it does.

Problem is CAGW is all about the ENHANCED greenhouse effect due increasing water vapour retention in the upper troposphere that does not exist!
Water vapour is decreasing in the upper troposphere (probably due to convective drying) therefore no CAGW!

Sorry R.Gates, 15 um IR does not effect the rate at which liquid water that is free to evaporativly cool can cool. Stop parroting and start thinking. Better still, design and conduct your own empirical experiments.

Indeed Athel, the mega Money Centre Institutions like Goldman Sachs have volunteered to be market makers for CO2 derivatives in Australia.
The projections are that, come world wide adoption of CO2 taxation, the many species of packaged CO2 derivs will make this market 3rd in value after forex and interest rates.

The trading in derivatives has no connection whatsoever with the science, apart from the science providing a label, and a veneer of substance. In fact it has no connection with reality.

You can set up a trade in moonbeams, and as long as there are enough willing buyers, somebody will appear as a willing seller, and as long as the pool of willing buyers is big enough, the trading will continue long after the original sellers have left the market, and are counting their profit.

And that is what is at the heart of Climate (whatever – insert word du jour).

The really criminal thing is that corrupt politicians are backing this as a good idea, and abusing their power to give it another coat of veneer, on the basis that the more glossy the shine, the more marks will be attracted.

Tristan, the common sense results in Watts paper suggest that problems found are likely to be minor unless you can show (with observations, not statistics) that concrete does not heat thermometers – that nearby airconditioner exhaust makes little difference, that square kilometers of airport tarmac doesnt heat the overnight minima of thermometers within 100m.

I thought everyone knew that UHIE was in the raw data, and that was why we corrected for it?

“We”? I didn’t know you were involved in the massive extrapolation of UHIE to all the pristine stations.

Doesn’t Watts’ paper itself show that after homogenisation, there’s no statistical difference between urban, rural and semi-rural mean temps?

Well, what is the purpose of homogenisation anyway, except to make all the data fit the model?

What exactly is the blockbuster revelation?

Maybe that adding the UHIE to every station isn’t the right way to go, if you are really interested in facts rather than propaganda?

I have a friend, Rich Keen who, besides being a PhD climatologist at the Univ of Colo has maintained a pristine weather station near his home in the mountains. His data is always “adjusted” upwards to match the stations in the metro Denver area (pop. 4,000,000). This is how UHIE is “corrected”.

Thus the warming rate is the same wherever the population growth rate is the same, regardless of their difference in population. On top of that, due to the logarithm, even if their population growth rates are significantly different (eg 1.07 versus 1.03) you still end up with very similar constant ratio between town and city in the trends.

Intuitively this should be the case, because the warming rate of a city is a linear extension of the warming rate it had when it was just a small town.

Therefore any small town and city near each other contemporaneously will have basically the same warming rate if they have nearly equal growth rates, DESPITE having hugely different populations and having measurably different night time temperatures due to a very real and significant UHI. A comparison between places that never grew and places that grew quickly should show a difference in temperature trend regardless of current population.

And the fact is that UHI is easily measured in any city. It leads to a DTR reduction which is locally indistinguishable from an enhanced greenhouse effect.

Since UHI is measurable, it is pointless to try to find a way to prove it doesn’t exist. Because it exists it must have influenced temperature records in high growth areas. The only mystery is why you would believe a statistic instead of photos.

As far as I can see, the official temperature has been confounded by UHI for a long time as this 2000 post by Hughes shows.

cohenite
July 31, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Hi BobC; I’m trying to get my head around this:

“His data is always “adjusted” upwards to match the stations in the metro Denver area (pop. 4,000,000). This is how UHIE is “corrected”.

Shouldn’t it be the other way round, as McIntyre explains:

Well, of course it should — but that wouldn’t give the “politically correct” answer.

As you note, McIntyre’s straightforward derivation shows:

…
Thus the warming rate is the same wherever the population growth rate is the same, regardless of their difference in population.

Hence, NASA’s method of using night-time satellite imagery to determine the local population density around a station misses the actual independent variable — population growth rate. Whatever algorithm they apply to “correct” UHIE is doomed to failure because they use the wrong input.

At any rate, most of the groups who massage the data suscribe to the theory that UHI has been shown to “have a negligible effect on the Global Temperature record”, as outfits like RealClimate continually assure us.

You couldn’t be more correct. BEST eliminates UHIE from consideration by the very construction of their “New Mathematical Framework” for analyzing temperature data (Described here in their methodology document “Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process”).
When you look at equations 1 and 2 (on page 7) of the linked document, you see that the only non stationary effect acknowledged on a temperature series is defined as Global Temperature Change. That is, any effect that doesn’t average to zero over a few years is defined as a change in Global Temperature.

Since, in the real world, UHIE is non-stationary (populations continue to grow), the “New Mathematical Framework” guarentees that UHIE will be considered to be “Global Warming”. The whole BEST project is mathematically bogus — perhaps why it hasn’t passed peer-review yet: Maybe they are having trouble finding reviewers reckless enough to put their stamp of approval on something this stupid.

Because I know you guys are all very skeptical, and wouldn’t want to judge information just on the basis that it agrees with you, here’s another review. Like Jo, he’s a blogger (yay!). Unlike Jo, he can actually evaluate homogenisation algorithms! (boo!)

Thanks for your link – though you might like to read it next time BEFORE you post!!

” I hope my judgement of the manuscript is fair, I had only little time.”

OR

“Update: Maybe I was too fast to conclude that the paper shows that trends are due to the UHI. This is the part of the homogenization literature that I am not so familiar with yet; it is frighteningly huge.”

Smarten up Tristan – don’t want to become another Adam Smith do you?? (Oops, sorry I mentioned Adam – haven’t seen him today – oh, that’s right – he’s been a naughty boy and got himself moderated hasn’t he??)

Cheers,

——-REPLY: Adam Smith is free to post here, but our request for evidence appears to have stumped him. – Jo

Tristan, if you’re into reading, go read Watts’ paper. Arguing for the sake or arguing doesn’t help you any. If you really care about the environment and global warming issues, you’ll want to know and understand what Watts is on about and how he can be so sure. So, go look!

I suspect that even this wonderful work from AW etal., still probably underestimates the UHI effect somewhat.

Let me put a scenario. A site, in 1970, is 2km from the ocean. It is a well maintained site, and has remained well maintained, with no concrete or other changes within 100m, probably still a class 1 site (if my understanding is correct). However, between then and now, a dense urban area, with factories, lots of vegetation loss, etc, has sprung up between the site and the coast.

How will this affect the measurement of temperature at the site, particularly in the evening, when the breeze is almost always onshore.?
Is this sort of possible change to temperature readings accounted for in AW etal.’s calculations?
Is it possible to account or it.?

This sort of situation could apply anywhere that the temperature site is downwind (prevailing fora time of day) from an expanding urban area. The effect might be small, but if enough stations are llike this, it could be significant.. we just don’t know.

I live on forest fringe. When I walk along the edge of the timber right where it abuts the paddocks, on a still night, especially in winter, the cold pools are very marked. Change the vegetation etc in that spot, and you can surely come up with a different minimum.

Alarmists must know all this. They just make stuff up. One day we had a freak cold in mid-October. I checked the temp at the Elders site. By chance, I went back to check it again that afternoon. A half degree had been added. That was just one day when I happened to check.

I think we attribute more sophistication to this racket than it actually has. Quite often, they just make stuff up. Simple.

‘In October 2011, despite the papers not being accepted, Richard Muller launched a major international publicity blitz announcing the results of the “BEST” project. I wrote to him and his coauthor Judy Curry objecting to the promotional initiative since the critical comments of people like me were locked up under confidentiality rules, and the papers had not been accepted for publication. Richard stated that he felt there was no alternative since the studies would be picked up by the press anyway. Later, when the journal turned the paper down and asked for major revisions, I sought permission from Richard to release my review. He requested that I post it without indicating I was a reviewer for JGR. Since that was not feasible I simply kept it confidential……’

‘On March 8 2012 I was asked by JGR to review a revised version of the Wickham et al. paper. I submitted my review at the end of March. The authors had made very few changes and had not addressed any of the methodological problems, so I recommended the paper not be published. I do not know what the journal’s decision was, but it is 4 months later and I can find no evidence on the BEST website that this or any other BEST project paper has been accepted for publication.

On July 29 2012 Richard Muller launched another publicity blitz (e.g. here and here) claiming, among other things, that “In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects [including those related to urbanization and land surface changes] unduly biased our conclusions.” Their failure to provide a proper demonstration of this point had led me to recommend against publishing their paper. This places me in an awkward position since I made an undertaking to JGR to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process, but I have reason to believe Muller et al.’s analysis does not support the conclusions he is now asserting in the press.‘

[My emboldening].

This is the way science works. Muller has committed the egregious sin of going to the NYT claiming he is right when expert reviewers have told him of his errors.

To all those who pick at details and suggest that the Watts paper might not be taken seriously I would just say that the basic approach and the results are what matter.

It is now in the public domain that there is a much better site assessment procedure which has not previously been methodically applied.

Also, that when it is applied, the difference in trend between sites of differing qualities becomes apparent. The most important point of Muller’s work was that there were no significant trend differences between sites of differing qualities.

The science has moved on such that the earlier assertions of Muller and the entire climate establishment are now out of date. They should graciously acknowledge that fact.

Leroy 2010 has been a time bomb waiting to go off and this paper has lit the fuse.

All else is chaff.

That is not to deny that warming has occurred but it does reduce it substantially from what we have been led to believe.

In the meantime natural variability is being shown to have a greater influence than previously recognised.

Those two factors combine to squeeze AGW into insignificance for policy purposes.

If only.
This paper comes about a year too late to save Australia. Our politicians will probably declare there is no other way to prop up the federal budget without their carbon tax revenue.

On the other hand we have a Leader of the Opposition who made a promise “written in blood” to repeal the tax, so here’s to hoping we have the world’s shortest-lived carbon tax, thanks in part to Anthony Watts’ team amongst many.

Sorry,
But the game was already up three decades ago when the most powerful people on earth realised that a one world global government required a one world global problem. Once the education system, the media were infiltrated and muzzled – the game was over.
We are stuffed. The level of deception that operates beneath the surface is staggering!

On the face of it, Anthony Watts did quite a preliminary beat up on his paper, a beat up that many felt was unwarranted when the prelims of the still to be published paper were released this morning EST Australia.
Some bloggers elsewhere have made a few comments on the importance of this paper in climate and other branches of science if it gets to pass peer review but almost no comments have been made on its eventual effect on the local national and International politics, both within science and within the political and global financial and environmental lobbyist industries .

So a few points all based on the probability that no major flaws will be found in the paper and it’s conclusions will hold up after being subjected to some of the toughest scrutiny that is ever likely to be trained on a single science paper for at least the last couple of decades.

1 / Thousands of research papers from most science disciplines using and / or based on the USHCN and ultimately the GISS and CRU temperature data now lose some or all of their validity and relevancy.

2 / The GHCN data base is now arguably catergorised as also being so corrupted for similar reasons to the USHCN as revealed by Watts and his fellow authors that it also can no longer be at all trusted or used in any future research work or at least until it also is thoroughly re-examined using the same analysis methods as used for the Watt’s paper.

3 / Some thousands of researchers who have relied on and used the USHCN [ and in all likelihood now, the GHCN ] will have had a large part of their research life. for some a period of 20 years or more, declared all for nought as the base temperature data they used in their research is now in all probability incorrect or just plain wrong.

4 / Hard questions are going to be asked as to why this corruption of the major temperature data base was allowed to persist for so long without any serious checking by independent researchers.

6 / Another perhaps final nail in CRU’s coffin over it’s refusal to release basic climate data for examination by independent and skeptical scientists. After this both CRU and GISS may both shortly be relegated into the back rooms of climate history as no longer to be trusted or relevant.

Politically!
1 / The entire basis of all governmental programs across all nations to reduce CO2 now has half any expected impact or less and therefore double the costs for any likely effects.
A lose, lose position for both the political apparatus and the citizenry.

2 / The energy poor, the tens of thousands of UK citizens, those who have to make the choice of “heat or eat” in the UK, the 800,000 households that have been cutoff from power in Germany as they can no longer afford to pay the bills, will now have a massive weapon to beat against the politicals who have created this situation by raising power costs through alternative energy scams and “carbon” taxes, all at the behest of their “climate scientists’ and the big and corrupt financing organisations who have relied on the data from the USHCN and the GHCN as the basis of their claims of harmful warming.

3 / A huge shake out in politics will eventuate over time as both advocacy politicians and their science advisers will be discredited, possibly totally if the Watt’s paper holds up in it’s ultimate conclusions.

4 / The entire rationale for alternative energy and the immense subsidies that it has managed to extract from the public trough no longer has much rationale to substantiate it’s claims that it is reducing Greenhouse gases and therefore saving the planet by lowering the rise in global temperatures.

5 / A lot of political operators are already searching for a way out of the financial morass created by their past lap dog subservience to alternative energy and carbon taxes and the immense expenditures on so called climate research and green house mitigation schemes. all of can now be wound right back to the point of extinction and probably will be within the next five years.

6 / The emotional impact of the green claims of catastrophic events that can be blamed on global warming will be reduced to a point of absurdity.

7 / The log jam of FOI’s on climate research will now suddenly take on a new importance as a lot of politicals and even researchers and some media will want to know and get to the bottom of how the the whole global temperature system was so corrupted by such a small cabal of climate scientists.

8 / A number of public money grant organisations may be investigated as to why their biases were so serious that skeptical scientists did not get any grants to investigate this aspect of the temperature data.

9 / Those losing influence and power;
A / A whole slab of global warming advocacy politicians.
B / Ditto. A whole class of advocacy climate researchers
C / Ditto; Certain universities and climate organisations and climate researchers associated with them.
D / Climate modelers en masse.
E / An entire financial climate scamming system involving billions of dollars / euros and thousands of employees as there will no longer be any need as the results generated will now be known to be almost unmeasurable in their minimal impact on the global temperatures.
F / Alternative energy lobbyists. All of them!

There will be many other causalities in the climate change / global warming capers but this list will do for starters.
Many of the events predicted above will not happen as there is huge inertia within the entire climate science discipline but in time the changes and no doubt some very long sharp knives in some now very vulnerable backs will become somewhat obvious.
Other unforecast and predicted events and developments related to the Watts paper’s outcomes will eventuate.
None will be of any real long term benefit to the continued meme of catastrophic global warming.

Only a few of the above events will happen in the short term but over the next couple of years as the world financial system falls apart, the really hard questions as to where all those possibly half a trillion dollars expended on climate research and alternative energy and mitigation schemes all went and to what purpose will be asked
And then get the pop corn if you can afford it!

The times are about right for Anthony’s paper as the European and then the global financial system starts it’s downward spiral into a serious global recession at best or possibly much worse.
Already the belief in the global warming catastrophe meme is collapsing under the restraints of financial pressures ,both personal, national and international.
And many will ask in the near future; Where has the money gone ?
And others will say; Look here!
And then the true picture of the Great Global Warming scam will finally emerge.

Unless there is a major flaw in anthonys’ work all of the vested interests will do whatever they can to nitpick, pillory, undermine and bury Anthonys paper. It will be trial by smear, propoganda and innuendo – in otherwords, nothing will change there

If it holds up to scrutiny, they will still undermine it, but will progressively start to back away from their beliefs – slowly and gradually. Unfortunately this is the nature of tribes and cults.

Keep in mind that Copernicus never got vindication until after his death, and galileo didn’t either (from the church anyway). I am not saying that Anthony is necessarily another copernicus or galileo, I am just using it as a benchmark to indicate the lengths powerful people will take to cover their own arses and percieved power base.

I hope you are right and I agree there may have to be a few more hits to add to AW’s sledge hammer to get the political ball thundering down the hill.
In NZ we are waiting for the High Court decision on the NIWA data fiddling case ( the judge is “deliberating”). A positive result will help.

Maybe when Tony Abbott & co get in next year ,if he follows Campbell Newman’s path and what Harper has done in Canada,that will help.
What I am saying is if there is a range of things happening ( not just science or data but also political moves) then the momentum will be hard to stop.
As you say it take a little time but it has to happen.

Andy, OK by me and thankyou. You do me a considerable honour with your request.

Just to add a couple of points; As many, most have pointed out there will be a huge attempt by vested interests who have access to billions of public dollars and a life time of careful building up of reputations at stake to try and destroy Anthony Watt’s and his co- authors paper.
However there is one inescapable fact now in the system and that is every scientist and every log rolling financier and every ministerial climate adviser will know that there is now a huge question mark hanging over the veracity of the global temperature data base which they in the past have used as the basis for science and advice to their political masters and as a source to justify their scamming of giga amounts of public monies.

And every one of those individuals will be aware that if they now use that data base and base any further claims on it they may well be very answerable, with some unfortunate personal consequences, to their peers, their political masters and the populace and investors in the not so distant future.

Regardless of the no doubt soon to be seen, desperate attempts to discredit this paper, unless Watt’s paper is substantially undone, he and his fellow authors have now sown the seed of doubt on the accuracy and truthfulness of the US and by inference at this stage, in the entire recorded Global temperature data base upon which the whole global warming scam is based. A doubt that will forever be lingering there until the day the scam is finally buried for good and as the Global data base is brought up to standards and an accepted accuracy that cannot be again substantially challenged.

An excellent futures and impact analysis. I tip my hat to you. There is nothing I could add.

The Ministerial Advisors have gone out on a limb, regarding the advice that they have given to their masters.

They have done this, because that is what their masters have wanted, for political purposes and trade negotiation purposes.

Anthony Watts has now cut off that limb, and all the Advisors have to cling to is the excuse that their advice was based on the “best” data at the time.

But unfortunately, that is the very excuse that the Politicians will wish to use, so the Advisors will have to go.

The impact that this will have to the various Public Service Administrations is likely to be significant. The ripples will travel right through the organisations involved. If you think that the Public or Civil Services are bad now, “well you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

Actually there is a bit more to add which I overlooked until getting to thinking about it.
This may have been touched on here or in other blogs but if my memory serves me correctly, always a doubtful proposition when you are 74 years old, then all the papers for the IPCC’s AR5, the Fifth Assessment Report due in 2013 / 14 were to be in by the end of July, today, the 31st of July 2012.

A commenter elsewhere noted that Muller and his BEST analysis apparently aimed to get his paper into the AR5 by announcing a preliminary release via a press release a few days ago to beat this deadline.

Now Anthony Watts and his crew have upstaged Muller but have also placed on record the fact that they also have a paper announced before the IPCC’s cut off date which brings into play the probability that the entire foundations upon which ALL of the IPCC’s science is based is in error by possibly at least twice the actual real temperature trend.
This questions the fundamental basis of most / all of the IPCC’s science of all the previous IPCC Assessment Reports.

The IPCC now have a hell of a dilemma.
If they go ahead with the current temperature data as the basis for all of their science in the AR5 and it is then shown after a forensic examination of Watt’s et al paper that Watts and his fellow authors are correct in their findings of a major corruption of the USHCN temperature data base and by inference in the GHCN data base then the whole of the IPCC’s AR5 will be null and void and not worth the paper it is printed on.

If they include a peer reviewed Watt’s paper then ALL the other papers and science submitted for the AR5 is likely to be null and void and the IPCC is back to square one.
Either way the IPCC is in one hell of a spot now with the upcoming release of it’s AR5 as if Watts is correct then all the science and claims from last 3 Assessment Reports are just junk.
Judith Curry on more than one occasion has hinted that in her opinion, the first AR was about the only one where the science could be trusted.

So the IPCC and it’s cabal of warmist editors have the choices of
1 / Burying Watt’s paper if at all possible.
However within probably 3 months or so Watt’s paper will have been peer reviewed and published one way or the other and it’s findings out there for analysis in the world of climate and other science.
And if it holds up in the science then the IPCC’s AR5 is dead in the water.

2 / Accept the findings of the paper and, announce to the world that due to these findings the science in the AR5 will now be re-examined and reassessed and the release of the AR5 will be put back to a date to be announced

Which of course says that all the previous IPCC science and conclusions arising out of that science is RS.

And politically, can anybody get their minds around the enormous political implications of this whole situation IF it will be shown through Watts peer reviewed paper that the IPCC, the supposedly definitive science based global organisation that has been the prime source of all politically based decisions on global warming / climate change policies amongst the governments of the world, which if Watts is proven correct, has been using wrong and corrupted data for over 20 years.

And those decisions have involved often severe societal changes and dislocations, substantially increased taxes and the expenditure of immense public sums all based on wrong and corrupted data for over 20 years, corrupted data that the IPCC has never attempted to verify or challenge,

The IPCC as a science and political organisation is finished forever and can now only bring down on itself and those who run it and research it’s science the opprobrium of entire nations and governments.

Anthony Watts with his press release on Sunday, released the genie from the bottle and it can never be put back.

Well done ROM. Make your posts into a crunchy piece with bullet points, and send it to Jo.

You’re absolutely right about AR5, the Jesus Paper (Wahl & Ammann) approach will no longer work to sustain their beliefs.

Another point was well made, to the effect that Anthony has basically offered a “get out of jail free” card to all the many other scientists who have (innocently and with best intent) relied on earlier papers (Menne, Fall, BEST, etc) to validate the temperature data.

Only now, with the hindsight of Leroy’s tools, can they – er – stop to reconsider the whole AGW on the basis of fundamental data, whose improvement needed to wait for the appropriate tools to be developed.

All week I’ve been wondering if we can quickly produce an Australian complementary version of Anthony’s paper. There’s been a lot of work here showing errors, but they tend to be different types of errors to those from the USA (at least until they leave our shores). Kenskingdom and other notables have shown reasons to decrease the Australian overall trend, but then we have tiny airport sites here whereas the USA has weather stations at some very big ones.

I’ve found the standard deviation of a data string to be a useful guide to consistency, but it is dependent on a large number of observations in the string, to mean much. Maybe converting some of the AW data to a metric like that and comparing it to ours would help us decide which way to go. There are plenty of sites in Australia that show larger and smaller trends than Anthony’s over a similar time period, but I think mainly for different reasons. Then one has to wonder what goes on in New Zealand, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Patagonia etc. Gawd, what a mess.

I’d been thinking this all day and was about to post when you beat me to it. The obvious thing about this is that the Leroy 2010 classifications can be applied to the stations from every other country. Will the same bias be revealed? Will it be better or worse? Nobody knows because it hasn’t been done.

Anthony needs “independent” replication… err… confirmation. His paper will be harder and harder to ignore as time passes, and… you know the importance of being able to say “other studies back us up”. This is what Mann says about his HS, so why not take on the weapons of our opponents so long as we fight clean?

No other than the Chairman of the IPCC has already coined the term “Voodoo Science”, and I think the examples given by Liddy fall exactly into that category, especially when considered in the light of the Watt et al paper.

Just to add, you know, Michael Mann and his ilk deem it appropriate to label climate change skeptics as holocaust deniers and beetle larvae. Only seems fair that we recognize his contributions to climate change science by giving him his own category. MANNIAN SCIENCE = hokey schtick science.

There is only one salient point that we should be focusing on. CAGW (Enhanced greenhouse) requires water vapour to increase in the upper troposphere. WV is actually decreasing.This one point FALSIFIES CAGW
All other points are irrelevant!

Let’s just not get too carried away by the anticipated reception to the WUT paper. The establishment (i.e. warmista) response, when it comes, is likely to be brutal (here’s an early warning). I suspect pro-CAGW organizations will close ranks against Watts with all of their usual bluster and prevarication, backed-up by one of the world’s most effective propaganda machines – the mainstream media, who will either rubbish Watt’s claims or (more likely) completely ignore it.

I applaud what the independent WUT team have contributed. I’m not so sure it stands a cat-in-Hell’s chance against the assembled might of the pro-CAGW publicly-financed political machine. We are so far down the CAGW rabbit hole that scientific climate truth is now barely surviving, even on life-support. But I must remain optimistic that there are perhaps a few good and fair-minded climate scientists who are prepared to enter into a civilized and informed debate with the WUT findings.

May I politely ask what is brutal about pointing out some differences between the press statement and the actual achievements of the manuscript by Watts et al.? I do hope it is allowed to read a manuscript critically. Anthony Watts himself advocates reviews of papers by bloggers.

Mate, you are just another example of someone on the government payroll defending his ricebowl.

FWIW I couldn’t give a rat’s rear end about all this statistical manipulation of data that is utter crap, being used for purposes for which it was never intended, to justify implementing solutions that won’t work, to a problem that never existed.

Seems you can get any answer you like from the data depending on how you process it. Probably means there isn’t a significant signal, just noise.

For the other readers who haven’t gone to the link this jerk is part of the government funded climate establishment in Germany. Like all the other European (mainly German) enviro “scientists” who come out here to tell us how the GBR will disappear, we’ll all shrivel up and blow away etc, etc. Given Europe’s financial problems these people should all be turned out into the streets to starve.

I’ve got a short fuse for this sort of thing right now, being stuck in Perth for at least a few more days until my co-pilot(wife) and I get over the flu and the weather clears enough for us to fly home.(Queensland)

Do you use all this foul language because you prefer a mud fight over a ration discussion? Makes a rather immature impression.

You should not believe me because I am a scientist, but based on my arguments. Then it is irrelevant who pays my salary and that I get my money from meteorology and not from climatology and could work in any other field as a trained physicist. Just show that my arguments are wrong. I guess by now even you have understood how sloppy the Watts et al. manuscript is. Even McIntre of Climate Audit and Roger Pielke Sr. distance themselves from the manuscript out of fear for their reputation.

A big thank you to Joanne for taking Anthony’s hard work and boiling it down to something the average person can understand. She does a really great service for all of us.

Now if we can get the lazy pseudo-journalists in the lame stream media to actually look at the information we might get somewhere. Here is a possible scheme:

Use links to Joanne and Anthony’s blogs and a printout of graphs.

Then use the fact that 7,800 people died in the UK as a result of fuel poverty.

In the USA use the fact that Coal provides 46 percent of U.S. electric power generation and the EPA just shut that power down long term and replaces it with high cost energy. From energycommerce.house.gov“the “auction was impacted by an unprecedented amount of planned generation retirements (more than 14,000 MW) driven largely by environmental regulations, which drove prices higher than last year’s auction.” replacement energy is 8 times higher than the $16 per MW price that was set for 2012-2013 ranging from $136 for the Mid-Atlantic/parts of the Midwest to a whopping $357 for northern Ohio.

Here is a nice Graph showing the impact. Even better take the typical household in your area (ask at your electric company) and show the monthly increase in the fuel bill. For Americans the average household consumes about 14000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year or 1166 (kWh) per month. You use that multiply for your new graph and you get a nice graph of the monthly cost increase.

I am sure similar figures are available for other countries.

Take all the information and shove it under the nose of your local paper. Tell them to go interview the local power company. This is BIG NEWS and effects all the every day people who read their paper. The MSM will not touch it but the local papers might. So lets do an end run around them. If that does not work make up a short and sweet flyer with the graphs and start handing it out.

Anthony and Joanne have handed us a big fat two by four so lets start using it to clobber some politicians mules.

We’ve had the advantage(?) of a Premier Mike Rann (a premier of very little brain) who pushed wind turbines and solar PV on us. Rann has gone, thankfully, but the damage remains. Wind is at 31% of capacity and solar PV at 5%, but what contribution they actually make is a guess.

I have a 2.9kW solar PV installation (couldn’t resist the legislated feedback tariff) and in over 2 months I have had 2 days where the amount generated has matched the consumption. Those days usage figures were 7.6 and 9.6 kWh, which brackets my average (3.2-3.4 MWh p.a.). So I need about 3.3 hours sunshine in the middle of a day to match usage. Fat chance in winter, possible in summer, and in neither season does it provide power at times of peak demand.

But those turbines and solar panels have really pushed up electricity prices; doubled in 6 years. I can afford it, but I really wonder what was going through the minds of Mike and his mates who claimed to be on the side of the less well off and disadvantaged who are bearing the brunt here, as in the UK and Germany.

I suspect it does, although we do not have the detailed site survey results that Anthony Watts has about the US sites.

The question is really about the adjustment algorithms that are applied to “adjust” temperature readings for whatever purpose. If those algorithms have been shared by the US, and are used in New Zealand, then it is reasonable to assume that the same discrepancies will be apparent.

We cannot confirm (or negate) that until we can do a proper, and controlled, survey of New Zealand sites, similar to the one conducted in the US.

I would just add to Rom’s excellent effect summary above that the educational systems all over the West have been redesigned using UNESCO criteria based on a redesigned global economy restructured around the environment. Centrally planned and determined economies deemphasizing the independent individual entitled to make personal decisions based on economic freedom.

It’s not enough to determine the false premises behind all these statist machinations. Althouh it is a great and necessary start. AGW was the illusory stated goal but we now need to set about extirpating the tools used like Outcomes Based Education practices and carbon taxes and deliberate attempts to mislead the masses through the media.

Otherwise we will continue to have policies designed to misportray reality to make people predictable, malleable, and controllable. Regardless of the temperatures and what we know about centrally planned economies.

The sad part is that NO ONE will even hear or care about this study. Not one mainline newspaper has published it. BEST is all over the place. The ONLY thing that will make this thing move is legal action against the people organizations promoting the fraud. Obviously NO ONE is prepared to take them on. Sad. Of course it could be that NO ONE is interested in climate anymore as it has beeen flogged to death. Maybe people are by now really really bored by the whole issue.

THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US government body in charge of America’s temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th-century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it . . . What (Anthony) Watts (of the Watts Up With That? blog) has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island Effect . . . . . . Poor Professor Muller has been telling anyone who’ll listen . . . that as a former “sceptic” he has now been forced by weight of evidence to conclude that global warming is definitely man-made and there has been lots of it (a whole 1.5 degrees C — Wow! that’s like almost as much as you’d get if you drove from London to Manchester!!!) since 1750.

Tragically as Watts has very reluctantly and by-no-means-experiencing-any-kind-of-Schadenfreude had to point out the data used by Muller to draw these conclusions was unreliable to the point of utter uselessness. So, in the spirit of magnanimity in total crushing victory, I would urge readers of this blog not to crow too much about the devastating blow Watts’s findings will have on The Guardian’s battalion of environment correspondents, on The New York Times, on NOAA, on Al Gore, on the Prince of Wales, on the Royal Society, on Professor Muller, or on any of the other rent-seekers, grant-grubbers, eco-loons, crony capitalists, junk scientists, UN apparatchiks, EU technocrats, hideous porcine blobsters, demented squawking parrots, life-free loser trolls, paid CACC-amites and True Believers in the Great Global Warming Religion. That would be plain wrong.

[I reformatted the comment for ease of reading and highlighted the important bits so that all the hideous porcine blobsters don't miss it. Hope you don't mind. mod oggi ]

Thank you so much for this highly intelligible analysis. I’d got the gist of the paper, but for a non-scientist like me, this greatly added to my appreciation. This is the place to come for analysis for the layman!

One comment to make. The best case scenario suggests 0.155 degrees Celsius per decade. In the next 500 years that is nearly 8 degrees Celsius. I know 8 degrees is better than the NOAA result of 15 degrees over 500 years. But it is still alarming. Am I missing something.

Wow, is it my lack of science or is it maths that scares you or is it just your greatness. By the way, I do have a science degree including distinctions in maths but that’s not the topic is it. I AM a skeptic but was surprised by the magnitude of 0.155 degrees / decade when 0.3 degrees is an often quoted figure but per century and not decade.

According to the CRU data we had a warming period from 1910 to 1940 of 0.45C or 0.15C per decade, also according to the CRU we had a warming period from 1970 to 2000 of 0.48C or 0.16C per decade. If you go back to 1860 to 1880 (yes i know only 20 years) this period also had a warming of about 0.15C per decade.

Now we see that if you discard all the dodgy stations and only look at the good stations we see a trend of +0.155C per decade.

In other words Mike there is nothing new in any of this warming, this fact has been a thron in the side of the warmbots for many years, oh and this warming began about 300 years ago before mans evil CO2 arrived.

Yes you have calculated that in 500 years the temp rise would be 8 degrees, this is how the IPCC amatuerishly calculate their trends and we all know how that has worked out for them.

Thankyou for the reponse, the work completed by Anthony Watts and Co. is very thorough. My question is, does the difference between the good data and the bad data reflect the Heat Urban effect or simply poor positioning of the temperature gauges? I would love to see the data as a graph based on population. For example, gauages representing cities with populations over 5 million all the way down to gauges representing towns with populations < 1,000regional centres. I have a feeling that the data would be significantly skewed, ie next to no change in regional centres.

I see it this way and if i am wrong then anyone can feel free to correct me.

We have good stations and we have bad stations, the good stations match the historical trends and they match the sat records. I dont think it matters where the stations are, in other words we have some stations that produce accurate RAW data we then correct for UHI etc and we are left with an accurate adjusted data for the days temp.

We also have bad data which give us incorrect RAW data we then adjust for UHI etc and we are left with incorrect adjusted data.

The problem lies in what do they then to make the incorrect adjusted data correct?

How can you accurately adjust the data for the incorrectness?

The bottim line is you have no idea what the errors are so therefore you cannot adjust the errors out with any degree of confidence, remember these are not adjustments for UHI etc these are adjustments because the site does not meet the standard, because the site does not meet the standard its data is inaccurate but you have no way of knowing how to adjust it out.

Yes Crakar,
Very strangely…that makes sense.
Mike,
Your ‘feeling’ is possibly correct….but there is no data to support that either.
My ‘feelings’ are the same as I live in a rural area with plenty of generational records to draw on but those records are not ‘official’ records.
If I look at those records and use the same basic techniques to both graph the trends and cycles and then extrapolate them, there is nothing ‘alarming’ at all that is happening. It has all happened before and there is no noticeable ‘correlation’ with anything to do with human activity.
The real point is that the ‘science’ is most definitely not settled.
There are 2 reasons for that:
1) Statistical analysis and computer generated extrapolations are not ‘Science’.
2)Computer generated extrapolations are only a tool and they are NOT a useful tool if a) they are not correctly updated or b) The data that was used to construct them is not ‘robust’.
This work by Watts has pointed out problems with both a & b above.

Sorry! This old guy hasn’t figured out these HTML tags yet for the quotes.

Roy Spencer of UAH has had already had a go at this using a simple model of increasing population densities to adjust station temperatures.
He came up with a linear warming trend figure of +.13 C / decade, astonishingly close to and within the range of Watt’s linear trends.
Spencer posted this in the April 2012 update of the US temps.

“A quick recap regarding this new temperature dataset: the area averages for the contiguous U.S. are based upon approximately 300 stations in the NCDC Integrated Surface Hourly (ISH) archive, which is updated daily here. Most of the stations I use are National Weather Service or FAA reporting sites at airports. The stations must have been in continuous operation since 1973 for them to be included.

My computation of a daily average temperature from each station requires 4 observations (at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC, which are standard synoptic reporting times), and there must be at least 80% of the days present for a monthly average to be computed for a station. Then there must be 80% of the months available over the 1973-2012 period of record, including all of 1973 and 2011.

I quantified the average increase in station temperature trends with increasing population density, and adjusted all stations based upon that average relationship to a nominal population density of 1 person per sq. km (this involved no extrapolation). Presumably, this is adjusting for the urban heat island (UHI) effect which apparently grows over time (people tend to build more buildings, roads, parking lots, add more AC, etc.)

Here are the resulting monthly temperature departures from the period average (click for large version):
[Graph]

Note that the linear warming trend I get (+0.13 deg. C/decade) is about 50% of that I get from analyzing the USHCN data (+0.26 deg. C/decade).

It is also a considerable reduction below what I get if I perform no population density adjustment (+0.22 deg. C/decade). Since that population adjustment is so large, here are the data supporting it (click for large version):
[ graph ]

The regression coefficient (.0422) has a standard error of estimate of about +/- 25%, which gives some idea of the level of uncertainty in the UHI adjustment I have made. The population adjustment is based upon the stations east of 115 deg. W longitude, since there did not appear to be a relationship between temperature trend and population west of that. The UHI adjustment is admittedly simple, being based only upon local population density in year 2000, and it might well be that some other method would do a better job of removing the UHI effect.” [end]

SteveF at the Blackboard pointed me to line 739 of the paper, which says:

By way of comparison, the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) Lower Troposphere CONUS trend over this period is 0.25°C/decade and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) has 0.23°C/decade, the average being 0.24°C/decade. This provides an upper bound for the surface temperature since the upper air is supposed to have larger trends than the surface (e.g. see Klotzbach et al (2011). Therefore, the surface temperatures should display some fraction of that 0.24°C/decade trend. Depending on the amplification factor used, which for some models ranges from 1.1 to 1.4, the surface trend would calculate to be in the range of 0.17 to 0.22, which is close to the 0.155°C/decade trend seen in the compliant Class 1&2 stations.

Yes you are missing something, this study showed two decades to compare with the warmist numbers. Since the time of the end of this study period the temp stopped rising and has started to fall. That then negates the previous warming, with the sun in a huff and the ocean cycles in the cooling mode 1900 temperatures will be upon us in short order. Thus zero warming for a hundred odd years.

The problem the earth faces at the moment is historical facts of the cyclic nature of ice ages and the rather inconvenient truth that we are due for one. If you care to look at the very long proxy record of temperature for this interglacial you may be surprised to learn that far from being fried to death, the temperature has been heading down for hundreds of years. We are in a cold spell and slowly getting colder. This time in our history 2-5 degrees warmer would be a blessing.

Temperatures on earth have never gone up and continued going up. They have never gone down and continued down. Essentially the earth’s climate seems to be “Bi-stable” that is it has a warm phase and a cold phase with rapid transitions in between Temperatures are also cyclical with a ~50-88yr cycle, a ~200 yr cycle, ~ a 400 yr cycle, ~ a 1500 yr cycle and of course the Milancovitch cycles.

This essay by a geologist shows why warming is not the real issue when talking of future climate.

We live today possibly near the end of the most recent interglacial, the Holocene, or the 11,715 years since we melted our way out of the last glacial, the Wisconsin Ice Age, the interglacial in which all of human civilization has occurred. Five of the last six interglacials have each lasted about half a precession cycle. The precession cycle itself varies between 19,000 and 23,000 years and we are close to the 23kyr point now, making 11,715 years about half……..which is why this discussion has relevance…..

This has been know since the late 1960′s since BEFORE the UN and Maurice Strong started pedaling CAGW and environmentalism in 1972 at the First Earth Summit. BEFORE we actually started to see any of the warming of the 1980′s. The 88yr cycle was also known at that time so an increase in temp could be easily predicted just as “Deniers” have been predicting a down turn in temperatures for the next thirty or so years.

The Milancovitch Cycles do not always produce enough solar energy to cause an interglacial but they ALWAYS decrease the solar energy so an ice age is inevitable. Other studies show the solar insolation is now low enough to flip the earth into an ice age. So let’s hope CO2 does cause a bit of warming. At this point we need all the help we can get.

“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial.… Sciencedirect Abstract

Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0450, USA et al

Ice recession was well underway 16 ka ago, and most of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets had melted by 6 ka ago. Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages… Sciencedirect Abstract

One other problem is colder temperatures mean the oceans suck down CO2 so crops will have to battle near starvation levels of CO2 as well as drought and the cold – UGLY. Even uglier is how fast it can happen.

…Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.

But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…”

Those graphs, especially the last one do not give me the warm fuzzies as to which way the temperature is ultimately headed. I sure would prefer a couple degrees warmer and wetter than a couple miles of ice. Time to burn as much coal as we can!

30 July: ABC Australia: World Today: New findings add to certainty on climate change, while one sceptic has a turnaround
University of Melbourne climate scientist, Professor David Karoly, says Professor Muller’s results confirm what numerous other studies have already shown.
DAVID KAROLY: If you consider a victory someone accepting clearly what evidence shows then yes, it is a victory, but I would not consider that to be an important victory because the vast majority of climate scientists around the world have been assessing the data for an extended period and have reached these conclusions more than 10 years ago…
SIMON LAUDER: He also says that his conclusions are stronger than the IPCC’s.
DAVID KAROLY: He does say that and his comments are difficult to assess at present, mainly because the details of his study are in fact under peer review for a scientific journal. But in fact the methodology that he’s used to link the observed warming to increasing greenhouse gases, the so-called attribution step, is not nearly as robust as many other studies have undertaken over the last 10 years.
SIMON LAUDER: It goes to show there’s always a place for some scepticism in science…http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3556287.htm

can’t wait years to be vetted, but WaPo has already found someone to offer words of caution on anthony’s:

30 July: WaPo: Brad Plumer: Two climate papers get hyped first, reviewed later. Isn’t that a bad idea?
Meanwhile, climate skeptic Anthony Watts trumpeted a new paper that questioned some of the techniques used by NOAA to calculate U.S. temperature trends. Watts’ paper was quickly heralded by climate-change doubters everywhere.
And yet, as my colleague Jason Samenow discusses in detail, neither of these research endeavors have yet undergone full peer review. Watts said he’s planning to submit his paper to a journal, while Muller’s group conceded that their studies still haven’t made it through review. That makes these papers no different from thousands of others around the world waiting to be reviewed and published by journals. So why should these findings receive special hype?…
(For those curious, Victor Venema, a scientist who does work in a related field, took an early look at Watts’ paper and offered some words of caution.)
One possibility is that these papers are so crucial that they can’t possibly wait years before being thoroughly vetted…http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/30/two-climate-papers-get-hyped-first-reviewed-later-isnt-that-a-bad-idea/

The result of the new study is shocking: Instead of correcting downwards temperatures that were heated by the urban heat island effect, the official US administration offices apparently corrected data from qualitively reliable stations upwards, which appears to be unjustifiable. If the result is confirmed, then it would be a shocking development. The warming in the USA over the last years would be far less rapid than what has always been assumed. And because similar errors are supected elsewhere, the issue could quickly gain global relevance.”

I asked Dr. Lüning to comment more on why this could have global implications. He kindly replied by e-mail:

Bit by bit others who might jump onto the train will now use the same methodology worldwide and will probably find that it really affects the global curve.”

Lüning and Vahrenholt also provide the press release in German at their site.

Take it from them; they’re experts. This could very well have global consequences. One thing is sure: It’s a an utter embarassment for the NOAA, and the perceived reliability of US and international data will be in question for years to come. Faith in the surface station data is crumbling.

For what it’s worth, that tiny mention on the BBC contained a link that has resulted in over 2000 referrals to WUWT in two days. Even the Guardian subtly included a link that resulted in substantial traffic. The Fox News article, however, contained links to the BEST home page, Ricard Muller’s NYT op-ed and even Michael Mann’s facebook page, but did NOT link to WUWT or the paper. Fair and Balanced indeed.

[...] Worse, the adjusted data shows an even warmer trend than the warmest and worst stations. That casts a very dark shadow indeed. How honest or impartial are the scientists who adjust data from stations with thermometers near air-conditioners and create more warming? Bad stations have been adjusted up, instead of down, and then the good stations were adjusted up to match the now-really-awful-bad ones. The stench of failure and a lack of dedication to the truth in on show… Read it all here [...]

31 July: Australian: Sue Dunlevy: Centrelink lays on extra staff to cope with carbon compo queries
The telephonic tsunami has forced the welfare agency that manages unemployment benefits, the age pension, disability and family payments to spend $206 million to increase staff numbers. The government has signed a new $474m telephone contract it says will allow it to move staff to areas of greatest need and redirect telephone traffic during peak periods.
Part of the extra load is due to inquiries about carbon-tax compensation and new rules for the education-tax refund, a spokeswoman for Human Services Minister Senator Kim Carr said…
“The government secured the jobs of 600 skilled call-centre staff with an additional $206m in the last budget. To deal with peak time this year, Centrelink has put on an additional 720 positions since March.”http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/carbon-tax/centrelink-lays-on-extra-staff-to-cope-with-carbon-compo-queries/story-fndttws1-1226438928910

30 July: CNN: Steve Hargreaves: Carbon tax gets unusual support
Calls for a carbon tax on fossil fuels like gasoline and coal are coming from a surprising quarter these days — Republicans.
In recent weeks, several prominent Republican thinkers have floated the idea of imposing higher taxes on gasoline, coal and natural gas. The increases, they say, would be offset by tax cuts on paychecks, dividends or corporate taxes…
The Energy and Enterprise Initiative, which launched earlier this month, has recently begun pushing the idea, with members making the rounds at college campuses and media outlets.
Talk of a carbon tax came to the fore a few weeks ago when conservative thinkers held a conference around the idea.
While the carbon tax plan is drawing attention now, the idea itself is not new in conservative circles.
For example, a 2007 paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, an influential conservative group, argued that a carbon tax would be preferable to other ways of reducing greenhouse gases such as mandatory emission limits.
One of the authors was Kevin Hassett, now an adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. A spokesman for Hassett said he was unavailable for comment. A Romney campaign spokeswoman said the candidate does not support such a tax, saying it would push jobs overseas…
“We have to have a system where all forms of energy bear their full costs,” President Reagan’s former Secretary of State George Shultz said in a recent interview with Stanford University News. Shultz now heads a task force at Stanford that is currently studying the feasibility of a carbon tax…
He also cites energy independence, as well as global warming, “which is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact,” he said. “The arctic is melting. A lot of people seem to be scoffing at the idea of global warming, but reality will catch up with them.”…http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/30/news/economy/carbon-tax/?source=cnn_bin

If you look at it from the point of view of Dr Evans “Regulating Class” Regulations, taxes, Socialism and anything else that taxes and/or controls commerce is all to the good.

Commerce (barter) between two independent people aka capitalism, benefits those two people. However Governments, Politicians, Bureaucrats, Banks, Middlemen, Corporations, grant seeking Universities and the rest of the LEECHES Regulating Class all want to horn in on the transaction and get a slice of the wealth involved. ~ If the Regulating Class actually contributes something of value by distributing the products, help manufacture them faster or builds the roads to transport the products and provide protection in the form of police/fire/armies, then fine and dandy. ~ But that is no longer what is happening. The regulating Class is now using the system to line their pockets without equivalent value given instead they trade goods are the destruction of our very culture and civilization.

This is why the regulating class, which includes the bankers big corporations and educators, are all pro-socialists and anti-capitalist/competition. It is also why the Regulating Class wishes to destroy the USA, EU, Australia and Canada. We are a “Mature Market” and we have our houses and plumbing and cars and computers. They have already milked us dry. China, India, Brazil, and Russia are young markets and therefore represent a lot of potential wealth to be “Harvested”

Also if they manage to force Agenda 21 down our throats it is the equivalent of WWI & WWII without the possibility of it getting out of hand (Nuclear.) This means after we wake-up (if we are not buried under ice) we will have to rebuild our civilization all over again.

Remember Robert Watson was the IPCC chair before Patchy and he works for the World bank. See Worldbank.org link for Watson’s Bio and their Socialist propaganda and compare it to their actions.

V. Lenin, the founder of the Russian revolution identified the strength of the United States when he said.
“The Socialist Revolution in the US cannot take place because there are too many small independent farmers there. Those people are the stability factor. We here in Russia must hurry while our government is stupid enough to not encourage and support the independent farmership.”

FROM: Cry Out of Russia…escape from darkness By Anna Fisher

Lenin was not just talking about the farmers themselves but about the community of interlocking small businesses comprising the fabric of America, Australia and Canada. This community of entrepreneurs has been the target of the “Regulating Class” for eons.

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from the highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicous, and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” ~ Robert Heinlein

Boy did he have that one right!

I hope I have explained that concept well enough. Before anything else we must identify our actual enemies and they are very practiced in keeping themselves hidden and us at each other’s throats.

30 July: Reuters: UPDATE 1-U.N. carbon credits fall to new record low
CERs fall to new record low of 2.67 euros a tonne
Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Anthony Barker
Benchmark United Nations’ carbon permits fell 7 percent to a fresh record low on Monday, taking their lead from lower prices for European Union emissions allowances and extending losses made last week…
Volume was low at 575 lots traded.
EU allowances (EUAs) for delivery in December 2013 fell by 3.76 percent to 6.66 euros a tonne, narrowing the spread between the two benchmark contracts to 3.99 euros.
The EUA contract dropped below a 6.85 euro support level earlier on Monday which prompted selling, he added…
Most of the demand for CERs comes from the EU ETS, the world’s biggest carbon market, which itself is oversupplied by over 1 billion carbon permits. Many analysts expect the EU scheme to be oversupplied at least through 2020.http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/30/carbon-market-idUSL6E8IU8Q820120730

31 July: SMH: Ben Cubby: Climate sceptics unmoved by scientist’s about-face
AUSTRALIA’S climate change sceptics remain defiant following the self-described ”conversion” of the prominent sceptic scientist Richard Muller, who had led a vast international research effort to debunk global warming science…
”I’m not convinced that [Professor Muller] was ever a sceptic although, of people I respect, there is a couple who do have a decent opinion of him,” said blogger Jo Nova in Perth, the author of The Skeptic’s Handbook.
Ms Nova said she did not expect climate change sceptics to change their minds because there were still potential flaws in Professor Muller’s work…http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-sceptics-unmoved-by-scientists-aboutface-20120730-23a6s.html

That article by Cubby is Year 9 English fail. A quick google search would show that Muller was no sceptic. Another search would find thats its not peer reviewed and one of the reviewers, Ross McKitrick, has even outed the process, so discusted was he with Muller’s shenaningans.

And yet another search would find the voices of dissent coming from even the most strident CAGW alarmists such as Mann and Appel.

And yet he sees no irony in his paper then putting up a survey on whether peoples belief about climate change is based on evidence! Would seem that Ben answered “No”

No mention of Watts et all’s new paper in the NZ MSM, but Radio NZ is genuflucting to Muller without even a trivial attempt at balance.
It seems Muller’s daughter, as well as Muller himself, have been lass than forthright about whether or not their stuff has made it through peer review – Ross McKittrick says not!

At that time I was still looking mostly at what GIStemp did, so looked at the data after it had combined GHCN and USHCN. That makes the USA report a bit “light” at about 1/3 airports. The GHCN along was something like 91% of USA GHCN stations were airports.

I break out the percentage by some regions, like New Zealand at 84% and Austrlia at 71% Airports.

Down near the bottom of the posting is a ’41% IN 2009′ that I think was just GHCN (global) It’s a long posting and I probably ought to redo it more cleanly and with newer GHCN only data…

Nice to see you’re still keeping your finger on the pulse E.M., just as I thought you would as per my comment @ 9.4. Hope things are warmer in California than it’s been in Tasmania these last few days! Jo. If you take up Chiefio’s kind offer I’m sure it will be what you need and I’d bet it will be as correct as humanly possible.

Needless to say, there are a lot of assumptions and they use the Government’s predictions of CO2 prices from the highly accurate Treasury modelling to establish relative competitiveness. I don’t have the time or inclination to examine the report in detail and explain exactly why I think it is ridiculous that the Government employed “experts” can predict the relative costs of technologies that don’t yet exist … but hey, that’s why they are the experts I guess…

WIND and solar photovoltaic will be cheaper than coal-fired electricity generation within 10 years as technology costs fall and the carbon price makes fossil fuel-based generation more expensive.

A significant new report into technology costs, the Australian Energy Technology Assessment, released today from the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, estimates that solar photovoltaic and onshore wind could produce some of the lowest electricity generation costs in Australia by 2030, based on current policy settings.

I’ve sent it to my favourite renewable experts and one of them replied

Oh yea! More crap.

I wonder what “based on current policy settings” means I guess it means if we maintain current level of subsidies, regulations, feed in tariffs, must take requirements, etc.

Even Black Caviar would lose if you placed all that weight on her

and why are all the solar firms going bankrupt?

Solar’s deathly spiral and the $650 million Suntech fraud
• Updated 1:02 PM, 31 Jul 2012
‘Solar company enters liquidation’ is already a familiar headline and one we should get used to seeing quite regularly over the next few years. A shakeout of epic proportions is underway in the sector and it has led to rapid stock price declines and a minor trade war that could escalate quickly in coming months.
The shakeout is far from over despite annual industry growth rates of 42 per cent, with selling prices remaining below cost for many manufacturers and prices only likely to fall further.
To pinpoint the cause is not difficult. Subsidies for solar, particularly in Europe, led to rapid production growth through the lure of decent profits. It encouraged plenty of new competitors to try their hand in the sector and as the new entrants gathered, particularly in China, prices began to fall rapidly – 75 per cent since 2008 and 45 per cent last year alone.
With prices falling so swiftly on the back of innovation and an oversupply, solar manufacturers in developed economies have been caught short. Most simply can’t reduce prices as quickly as the likes of manufacturers in China due to considerably higher labour costs. That being said, even the Chinese firms are struggling.

You regulate the HECK out of them like the US EPA just did so the costs of production sky rockets. Once Coal cost ten to twenty times what it does now and more over it is impossible to comply with the regulations then we are back to the early 1800′s (If we are lucky) Meanwhile China, India, Russia… have all their nice World Bank loans for building their lightly regulated plants. SEE: http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/78984/coal-ignored-juggernaut.

Seems the City of London is finally getting their own back for the American Revolution. Remember before the revolution the USA was not allowed manufacturing. It took 250 years but they are now enforcing that edict.

How the heck people are willing to go along with their own wholesale destruction completely mystifies me.

Jo, Is there a reason why you don’t spell Professor Muller’s name correctly? Maybe you don’t want people to do their own reading of his study where he states that when they did the numbers using only rural based weather stations (no concrete, airports, airconditioners) there was no difference to the figures stated. I guess it’s much easier to be uninformed and biased than to believe empirical science when you don’t like the results of it.
Get a real job.

——————————————–
I have only found one misspelling of Muller’s name in the many times it was mentioned in the last couple of postings, (now fixed). Rather than make wild accusations, if you find spelling errors it would be helpful if you would point them out as we are only interested in the truth at this site.

Clearly you have missed the point of the Watts et al paper. The temperature station classification system used by Muller is inaccurate and out of date thus invalidating his conclusions. – Mod

Interesting issue is whether it is possible to manufacture solar cells using a solar cell powered plant as the energy source.

I don’t have the time to Google all this, but some here might search for how solar cells are manufactured. If they required molten glass etc, then, ahem, that requires a large volume of energy in a very focussed form. Gas? Coal? Nuclear? Could wind, solar and tidal generate enough energy to rotate a large generating plant to melt the silicon to form the cells?

Yes, some are manufactured in Northern China, mostly using electricity produced from coal fired generation stations, and far away from the prying eyes of most Westerners. You can see the plants on Google earth, if you know what you are looking for.

Watts et al draft paper has certainly shaken things up, and now seems to be moving towards a second draft. A number of things to be addressed, but I picked up on the mention of TOBS (Time of Observation Bias). Having followed the excellent and disturbing demolition of the ACORN series, is something similar to the Watts analysis planned for the ACORN series? Any evidence of TOBS, mis-classification of sites with BoM? I somehow doubt that the revelations from the US are unique, or the BoM “adjustments” are original.

Watts compared raw data with adjusted data – adjustments including equipment change (current electronic thermometers and their enclosures read a bit cooler than the old Stevenson screens), time-of-observation bias (TOBS – many rural stations have shifted to early morning readings, another cool bias), and placement changes for various stations (varies by station, but generally cooler as stations tend not to get moved to _worse_ locations).

TOBS issues have been discussed in the literature since at least 1854. This is the likely cause of the rural/urban differences they found, as urban stations have historically had many fewer changes in observation time according to the site logs. Accounting for those changes is a necessary step prior to making any kind of judgement about UHI effects.

[I find it quite curious that one of the outstanding discussions of TOBS effects, Karl et al 1986, is listed in Watts bibliography - but was apparently not read...]

Failure to take into account known changes in reading offsets is (IMO) a critical fail for the Watts paper. Apples and oranges – Watts is making the wrong comparisons.

There are multiple other issues, such as land anomaly value scaling versus satellite temperatures, as discussed here.

—

I do not expect the paper to get past any kind of peer review or be published in anything like its current form – far too many problems.

More specifically warmers are concerned about the Atmospheric Temperature on a Global Average, however that might be calculated.

The worlds UHI affected zones when combined take up a very small land space so it is not unreasonable as a first estimate of “average world air temperatures: to Exclude all temperatures in know UHI locations.

Much of the thermal production of UHIs goes straight up by convection and ultimately to deep space via radiation transfer.

The only valid measure of world atmospheric temperature is when you have a continuum of data FROM THE SAME METHOD OR SYSTEM.

Warmers have caused untold havoc by integrating records from the past with current data eg temp, CO2 levels.

Even satellite temperatures are only accurate as a result of a “standardisation” process by comparing with a known land measurement and could be in error in absolute terms.

They will however give reliable relative values ( if they haven’t been homogenised) and they show currently NO WARMING.

Watts is showing that the UHI has been inclded in the previous records when claims were made that it was removed?

“Watts is showing that the UHI has been inclded in the previous records when claims were made that it was removed?

Is that right?”

No, it is not. Watts compared raw data to data corrected for known issues, such as site changes, time-of-observation bias (different between urban and rural areas, as known from observation records and seen in the data), and equipment changes. He also applied an unsupported down-scaling factor from satellite data (he used 1.4, it should be closer to 0.95-1.1).

Only after you have corrected for these rather significant known factors can you look for UHI. Once you do, UHI has no significant effect.

BEST used a completely different technique (kridging, breaking station equipment and monitoring changes into different records rather than attempting to correct them, testing statistically independent subsets) based upon known correlation of temperature anomalies – and they found no significant UHI effect.

And in fact, UHI represents a fairly tiny portion of the globe – sea surface temperatures and satellite temperatures agree that UHI has no significant effect.

—

To be blunt, Urban Heat Islands as a distortion of global temperatures are a dead, dead horse, and it’s very sad to see people continuing to beat it. Watts paper will likely need a complete rewrite, and I don’t think his conclusion of a 100% error in trend will survive a real look at the data.

KR
August 2, 2012 at 9:42 am · Reply
…
BEST used a completely different technique … based upon known correlation of temperature anomalies – and they found no significant UHI effect.

Well, the main reason BEST “found no significant UHI effect” is that their New Mathematical Framework for analyzing temperature records doesn’t allow any change in a record to be identified as UHI.

Look at equations 1 and 2 (page 7 on the Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process documentation). BEST only acknowledges three components to any temperature record: The location effect, the weather effect, and the global temperature component. Of these three, only the global temperature component is allowed to move, on average — the other two are defined to be stationary; that is, they average to zero over sufficient space and time.

Urban areas grow over long periods of time (decades) — hence their effects also grow over decadal periods. The reason BEST “finds no significant UHI effect” is that they have, from the very start, defined it to be Global Warming.

The whole BEST project is mathematically bogus, and nothing but planned propaganda.

To be blunt, Urban Heat Islands as a distortion of global temperatures are a dead, dead horse, and it’s very sad to see people continuing to beat it.

UHIs may have a trivial effect on the actual Global Temperature Average, but they have a major effect on the locations where many thermometers used to try to measure Global Temperature are sited. It is an unavoidable conclusion that, therefore, many of those thermometer records are corrupted by UHI effects.

The dead horse, I think, is the faked models the CAGW crowd has been trying to ride.

“To be blunt, Urban Heat Islands as a distortion of global temperatures are a dead, dead horse, and it’s very sad to see people continuing to beat it.”

KR if you read what I have said it would be a in complete agreement with your statement.

Effectively what I said was that UHI is not really all that relevant (at first glance) to the FINAL MEASURED ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE.

What may also be inferred or read from my earlier post was that Warmers have used UHI located temperature recordings as normal locations and

thereby increased the actual values above what they should have been.

I think this is the point of AWs paper.

If it isn’t then we are all a bit confused.

Dirty deeds have been done and no amount of verbiage will cover that over.

You also make another comment that “Checking just rural stations raw data shows that UHI has no significant effect.”

Well I suspected that there would be no effect on the WORLD temp, but you can’t use the readings taken in a UHI affected location and pretend they are truly representative of the whole Earth — even if they are Homogenised and Pasteurised.

KinkyKeith - Everyone who has actually looked at the data (without making major mistakes such as Watts in his current draft) has found that any UHI influence is at most an order of magnitude smaller in influence than observed trends. And the influence could be as well negative as positive in influence (both are within the bounds) – it’s really really small.

“…and thereby increased the actual values above what they should have been.”

That’s just not what’s in the data.

If you disagree, then prove it. It’s really not hard to test. Here you can find a 65 line Python script that lets you look at GHCN values, raw, adjusted, and rural. Caerbannog and Zeke Hausfather have done the same analysis.

And none of them find UHI distorting the temperature record. It’s just not an issue… and claims to the contrary, without evidence, are just not credible.

The discrepancy between observations and the adjusted data may be in his analysis, or the discrepancy between observations and the adjusted data, may have always been there and nobody happened to notice it before. (That would not be the first time that has happened in science).

Or the discrepancy between observations and the adjusted data may have always have been there and everybody chose to ignore it because the erroneous data happened to better match their hypothesis in favour of warming. (And unfortunately, that has also happened in science more times than it should.)

Or the discrepancy between observations and the adjusted data may have deliberately introduced to better match their hypothesis in favour of warming. (And unfortunately, that has to be interpreted as fraud.)

But all we can say, at this point in time, is that there is a discrepancy.

But I note, in passing, that the analysis in the Watts paper produces results that are much closer to those observed in the satellite record, than those produced from the current models. Isn’t that interesting?

Perhaps if Watts has made a “major mistake”, the satellites have as well?

Rereke Whakaaro – There are indeed major issues with Watts draft paper, to the extent that contributors to the paper are now expressing doubts.

On the various adjustments – first and foremost, changes such as site location, equipment (thermometer updates, enclosures), and shifts in time of observation have known affects on site data. Rural US stations, for example, have undergone a significant shift over the century towards early morning readings, biasing those temperatures low, while urban stations (easier to read, for one thing) have not. That accounts for ~50% of his “doubling”. Not correcting for known biases will lead to incorrect conclusions.

As an interesting note to this, the BEST temperature reconstruction doesn’t use metadata corrections – just examining statistical subsets of the station data for breaks, for sudden shifts in single station temperature anomalies. They split those records at that point, treating them as separate stations. With this completely different technique they come out with the same results as the metadata corrected USHCN temperature anomalies. That consilience between techniques is a strong support for the results.

The comparison between the satellite data and ground temperatures is a very interesting aspect of the Watts paper – he claims a scaling of ~1.4 between land surface and satellite data (near the upper end of the global value, including oceans), whereas the current estimate is somewhere betwen 0.95-1.1; and there’s much of the rest of his “doubling” – not to mention that while satellite data is a very useful comparison, it is not a gold standard, and there are credible indications that they might be biased low.

Those aren’t a complete list – but just those two issues bring Watt’s entire conclusion into doubt.

As to conspiracy theories, well, let’s just say I rank those up with the leprechaun influence…

not to mention that while satellite data is a very useful comparison, it is not a gold standard, and there are credible indications that they might be biased low.

I am interested in why you would say “It is not a gold standard”. When I worked for NASA, they were very careful to ensure that all equipment was calibrated, to very tight tolerances, before deployment. There is not much point in sending something up in a bird if it is not going to work to a very tight and known tolerances.

Also, you say, “there are credible indications that they might be biased low”. Biased low compared to what, exactly? What is the standard used for the comparison, and what is the acceptable tolerance range? And why should they (all) be biased in one direction?

Biased in terms of both absolute value and/or trends. Calibration of satellite data, indirectly determining temperatures at different layers of a mostly transparent atmosphere using microwave emissions, is not easy. See the Remote Sensing Systems tech reports for some examples.

These results could arise either because (1) “real world”
amplification effects on short and long time scales
are controlled by different physical mechanisms, and
models fail to capture such behavior; or because
(2) non-climatic influences remaining in some or all of
the observed tropospheric data sets lead to biased
long-term trends; or (3) a combination of these factors.The new evidence in this Report favors the second
explanation.

I’m afraid you will have to enjoy the sounds of nature for a while – I will be out of range of modern technology for the next week or so. Silence is not agreement, and instant responses on blogs are not my top priority…

Absolutely no capacity shown to do even a basic preliminary assessment of a situation.

Don’t have to be very smart and even a Professor from The University of Skeptical Science should have seen this coming.

Quoting KR.

“Everyone who has actually looked at the data (without making major mistakes such as Watts in his current draft) has found that any UHI influence is at most an order of magnitude smaller in influence than observed trends. And the influence could be as well negative as positive in influence (both are within the bounds) – it’s really really small. ‘

So its really really small.

When all the moo cows and sheep are asleep the humans are at it with their nocturnal TV habits and cooking and so on.

In winter there is an electric heater (electric is the best because it gives off the most CO2 for plants)and in summer Algore runs a huge air con unit that he has camouflaged and made up to look like a pine grove next to his house.

Well wadda y know every house will be pumping out about one kilowatt of energy for at least several hours after dark.

On an average home this would be 10 watt/square metre. Where I live there are 155,000 homes plus Al knows how many cars.

And the Visiting professor from the SSU tells us there is a teeny teeny UHI effect.

It’d be a damn good place for you to start KK, that’s if you could understand what they were talking about…

KR’s gentle suggestion that you should look into those errors is worth heeding, just as Skeptical Science’s gentle critique and useful suggestions for further review would be highly worth heeding by Watt’s et al…. But will they (you?)? Probably not.

Matt, if Skeptical Science had been honest or done their research they may have revealed to readers that the BEST paper had been rejected for Peer Review publication by the Journal of Geophysical Research which is why Muller decided to release the paper publicly without it being peer reviewed. Ross McKitrick’s explanation of why he has now decided to breach the confidentiality of the peer review process as a reviewer of the BEST paper, and his reviews of the BEST papers can be seen at his blog site here: http://www.rossmckitrick.com/

However I wouldn’t use Skeptical Science as a source for any decent scientific critique of a climate science paper when they were all too ready to accept Muller’s BEST paper and his claims of having once been a skeptic hook line and sinker here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1559

KinkyKeith - I look forward to seeing your temperature reconstruction comparing rural, urban, and global temperatures with raw and/or adjusted data, from any of the various sources (here are some links to those sources).

It’s not hard – Nick Stokes, Zeke Hausfather, Chad Herman, Caerbannog, Steve Mosher, and many others (all bloggers, just search their name and “temperature reconstruction”) have all managed to do this simple bit of analysis. And they have all found that the global temperature record is solid, that UHI isn’t an issue, etc.

Again – claims of UHI distortions or erroneous temperature records without evidence are just not credible. You have provided, well, none.

Rereke Whakaaro - The links and names I provided include various code examples (Python and R, for example), as well as fairly detailed instructions on fetching the data and the area-weighting techniques used. In addition I gave a link to a collection of the raw and adjusted data sets, which you can download directly.

KinkyKeith – With all due respect, I’m not going to do other folks work for them. The data has been examined by many people, all of whom have found consistent results; that work has already been done.

If you (or Rereke) disagree, it’s up to you to prove your claim. I’ve pointed to data, to code – if you feel the analysis is somehow lacking, then you need to do the analysis work, and support your conclusions, yourself.

If you feel the analysis is incorrect, well then – I shouldn’t have anything to do with that end of your work, as I consider the current analyses quite reasonable…

Well, data is not much good without the file structures, and the encoding scheme, it is just bits. And code examples (i,e, samples) are useless without the infrastructure that supports them.

I gave you a list of what I would need to have in order to take up your offer. I do not expect you to do the work for me – what would be the point, it would spoil the fun for me. But at least following on from the previous discussion I thought you were serious.

Rereke Whakaaro – Data formats are documented by the various sources. Code available at those links include examples in Python and R (both free computation environments). Multiple bloggers have taken the time (a few days at most) to generate their own plots, and they include the code.

If, however, you demand I hand-hold through this exercise, I would consider that simply a rhetorical tactic rather than genuine interest. You need to do your own work – I’m quite happy with the methods already applied, and should have nothing to do with your analysis.

Indeed, I am in possession of your suggested science degree – so what? You don’t need one to dissect this embarrassing rush job.

Have you read the SS critique yet? What are your thoughts on the problems with using non- homogenized data for the comparisons and not controlling for siting changes, instrument changes and other methodological inconsistencies? Do you think they might affect the validity of the results?

Notice Jo has ignored that question too as she was lost in hero worship…

And what about the fact that only a tiny percentage of earth’s total energy budget is represented by the US land mass? Oceanic thermal imbalance of any import? Your thoughts….

They are typical “true believers” wanting references and sources but cant explain the “content” themselves _ a higher being is needed for

that — perhaps a “peer”?

KK

[Yes, we know KR - he comments by shouting loud, but without facts. I have not noticed Matt Bennett before, perhaps he is KR's minder. They are doing a lot of arm waving, and throwing ad homs around but without any substance. This is not the forum to demonstrate whether Watts is right or wrong. They are simply making noise to try to capture the "popular vote" on this site, and clog the thread. In my view they are being spectacular failures at both. I wouldn't waste time on them. -Fly]

“…we know KR – he comments by shouting loud, but without facts. … They are doing a lot of arm waving, and throwing ad homs around but without any substance.”

That, Fly, is inaccurate to the point of amusing. I do my best to link to data, methods, and research papers whenever possible, to an extent I do not often see on this forum (the “facts” as we know them), and have not engaged in Ad Hominem arguments (please, feel free to point them out if you feel that I have).

[Incidentally, I have no idea who Matt Bennett is...]

“This is not the forum to demonstrate whether Watts is right or wrong.”

It certainly seems to be a thread celebrating Watts paper – with the underlying assumption that he is correct. If this is not the case (and I’ll note that contributors Steve McIntyre and Dr. Pielke Sr. are now expressing doubts about that draft paper), then whether the paper is right or wrong is an entirely appropriate topic.

—

The Watts draft paper has serious problems, as even a cursory Google search will reveal – and, Fly, if you do not like those facts, that substance, I’m just going to have to disagree with you.

[If you had read those two references, as I have, you would not have said that they expressed doubts about the draft paper, other than about the process followed, which is admittedly unusual. Do not try my patience, I have a short fuse - Fly]

Given that both McIntyre and Dr. Pielke have raised concerns about Watts ignoring time of observation biases (an issue known since at least 1854), and that proper handling of the TOBS invalidates Watts primary claim:

These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. 64 mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.

(emphasis added)

…I would have to say that their concerns are both significant and relate to the core of the paper.

[...] the options at wood-for-trees. Major defects ranging from statistical methodology to ignoring or not allowing for UHIE have been levied against Muller. So what does his latest paper do? It purports to show there is NO [...]